BioWare elaborated on their promise that global cooldown customization features will be coming soon in a recent developer blog by Stephen Reid. He had this to say on the matter:

This week several user interface changes were made as part of patch 1.1.2, including some that changed the look of the ‘global cooldown’ animations. ‘Global cooldown’ is the delay after an ability is used before other abilities can be used. As the global cooldown can affect many abilities at once, the animation is seen frequently and for some, the changes made were distracting.

Our UI team took this feedback to heart and worked up a solution which gives every player a lot more choices in how cooldown animations are displayed. If you’re happy with the way the game currently looks, you can ignore these changes – but we think some of these preferences will be welcomed by many players.

Currently, these new preferences are scheduled to be added to the game in patch 1.1.4, which should be available for preview on the Public Test Server next week and deploying to the live servers soon afterwards.

He went on to outline some of the features players will be able to customize such as turning the flash for when an ability finishes its cooldown on or off, different art styles for what abilities will look like when they are on a cooldown, the ability to change when the game will start showing tenths of a second on cooldown abilities, plus several more. They even included a video showing some of the customization options in action.